The Path to Salvation
by Knightfall1138
Summary: Louis Doyle tells his story about the growing infection and how a simple building project saved hundreds from devastation.


This fanfic is based on the book:

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

By Max Brooks

* * *

Modesto, California

**(The room is lit only by the sunlight cascading in through the overly-large windows on the eastern wall of the apartment. Louis Doyle says this is his favorite room and every night he's home he makes it a priority to watch the sunset. He is distracted by this sight for a minute before I kindly interrupt.)**

You've got to understand that the infection hit at the worst time possible: Mid-day. And what's going on then? School's in session. Parents are at work. Kids are at the babysitters…Once it became clear was to what was going on, the only panic was the families trying to get back together. I don't even have to tell you how successful that was. Traffic jams became the tomb for most. Find anybody around this town my age and chances are they lost their parents too that day.

As for myself, I was home with a cold. That's what I told my mom, at least. I have many regrets in my life, but the worst is still that a lie is the last thing I told my mother. She was a smart woman. I'm sure she knew, but still…

Anyways, couldn't even hear all of the commotion outside over my stereo. That and the Xbox just happened to be on. Wasn't about to lie in bed all day, I had to do _something._ It was only when I went out into the kitchen to get some water did I learn what was happening. One of them was already pounding on my front door and another was trying to pull itself up to my kitchen window. Lucky it only had one arm or they might have been in the house already.

I wasn't sure what to do. I mean, I was eighteen! What does a teenager do against a walking, rotting corpse that's knocking at your door? You freeze, that's what. Take in the sights, so to speak. Wait for your brain to bitch-slap you back to reality and tell you to get moving.

First thing I did was board up the windows. Grabbed some nails from the garage and ripped our dinner table apart for the boards.(All the while I was wondering if my parents would be mad at me when they got home.)

**(He Sighs.)**

The door was another matter. It was heavy as hell but it was still rattling on its hinges. Damn things were strong for being so dead. Used the rest of the table to board it up and pushed the couch up against it for good measure. It held. Just barely, but it held.

Weapons weren't hard to come by, but I was joking with myself thinking that I knew how to use them. I had harmlessly threatened many people with death by that time, but I never ever thought I would have to seriously contemplate how kill something. With an axe, at that.

I just sat there. Waiting. Occasionally I would take a peek out the sliding glass door to see if any had gotten in the backyard. I could hear the neighbors arguing before the screams started. Wanted to do something, but…couldn't. My mind wouldn't let me.

Eventually the pounding stopped. I don't know why. Can only assume someone a bit more accessible passed by. Either way, it got dead silent.

**Silent?**

Well, yeah, I'm sure it wasn't technically silent. But, you know, it was just quiet. I was alone. The news was spouting out terms like "apocalypse" and "terror" before the electricity dropped. I was alone. I knew it right then. My parents weren't coming back. There wasn't going to be any help…It was quiet.

**(He takes another look out to the horizon.)**

Living is what most of us know how to do. Surviving is a whole different story. Everytime I was hungry, there was a refrigerator filled with food. Whenever I was thirsty, there was a sink a few feet away with running water, or there were sodas. It wasn't like that anymore. I didn't even think about filling the bathtub with water before the pumps stopped working. Sorta glad I didn't, though. I heard recently that some of the infected were found paddling around in the irrigation systems.

Had I lived anywhere else in town, I might not be sitting here today. Our street was a little rough and my father insisted on caging up the windows in the rooms that faced the street. The rest of the windows were easily boarded up with whatever I could find. Make the place defensible: that was the only clear thing to me at the time. Make sure they can't get to me.

From dawn till dusk, I boarded up everything. I didn't care about leaving myself an exit as we had an attic. I had heard they weren't good climbers. Don't remember where. Maybe it was a guess at the time. At any rate, I figured that the roof would be the best place to leave whatever the situation. Even before I slept, I made sure I had quick access to the roof if I heard something, and I heard a lot of somethings. Car alarms would randomly go off. Fighter jets would streak over at times. I don't even have to mention the screams. They didn't die out for days.

**When did food start to become a problem?**

Not for a couple weeks. I had quite a bit of canned food, but most of our perishables were rotting by then. I nearly cried when I finished off the rest of the apple cider.

**I assume this is when you…**

Yep. But it didn't get started easily. First time I decided to survey the town from the roof, I almost invited the slaughter. I was up there for…well, it couldn't have been more than thirty seconds before I heard one of them start moaning. One of the scariest times of that whole ordeal because, for a while, I had actually convinced myself that I could make it through this. Then when a hundred of those zombies are suddenly slamming themselves against every window and door on the house, that kind of thought goes away pretty quickly.

I couldn't have them getting into the house. I couldn't. I had nowhere else to go. So I did what I could from the roof and started breaking heads. I grabbed a shovel and started jabbing away. Found it way more effective than the axe. It was light and the tip could puncture the brain without much effort. Got the last of them that I could reach just before dark. There were a few more crawling around with a lack of limbs. Took them out with the axe. Easy as pie. Ha! That's what I kept telling myself until I started throwing up involuntarily. Killing something, even if it was already dead, weighed heavily on my mind for the next few days.

That's when I made up my mind. I wasn't going to sit around and wait to die. Wait to become one of them. There was a grocery store at the end of the block, and I had every intention of getting everything I needed from there.

**Is that when you started building?**

Didn't have a reason to. Found an easy way to the ground in the morning and set out on foot—shovel in hand, of course. I didn't see any infected during that whole trip, and I filled my backpack up with food rather easily. A bunch of canned foods, a few apples and some bottles of water. Just enough so that I wouldn't have to push a cart back home and still be fine for a few more weeks.

The return trip was another story. I start walking back down the street when I see one of them just standing right on the yellow line. He doesn't have a jaw, but he still finds a way to start moaning. I take him out with the shovel, but it was too late. It was really annoying this little line of communication they had. Turned one pushover into an army in less than an hour. A friend of mine called it the "Twilight Bark" of the undead.

**(He laughs.)**

So, I had another day of killing walking dead. Nowhere near as many as before, but it was still a substantial amount. Once they were taken care of, I ate and slept. _That's_ when all this…nonsense started happening.

**Nonsense?**

Yeah, nonsense! What were they calling it recently…I have the newspaper somewhere around here. Oh! The Path to Salvation. Nonsense! I didn't make that bridge out of some higher purpose. I wanted to live! Every few days, I got attacked and it made getting to the shops for food a tad difficult. So, I got a few planks from my backyard and built a makeshift walkway to the house next to mine. Then built one from that house to the next one, and so on. It took my mind off of everything. Good ol' manual labor. It kept me sane for the longest time. When I got halfway to the store is when survivors started showing up. They had seen me doing my thing from wherever they were hiding and thought I had some kind of operation going. So, I shared what food I had and kept on building towards a readily available food source.

**(He points to the infamous image of the crudely-built bridge spanning the rooftops of an entire block and branching off into surrounding areas.)**

I had a bit of help, obviously. Everyone wanted to assist me. Like we were building a ladder to Heaven or something. Once we got it built all the way to the store, we had a mini-celebration. There were around fourteen of us once we got there. A few of them started thinking, "Why do we need to stop here?" We had enough supplies. We can keep going to another shopping center or to more defensible buildings. I thought it was a neat idea. I laughed, but they were completely serious. It seemed totally logical. We could fight the zombies easily from rooftops, and we'd have access to food. Why not?

By the end of the first year, there were nearly fifty or sixty of us just building away. I think between everyone we had killed nearly a thousand undead. It was working out so well. Too well. I was hearing stories from arriving survivors about what was going on around the world. That's how I heard about Yonkers and that whole mess in Russia. I kept thinking, maybe it was only a matter of time.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we only had that one incident. One of our fellow "colonists" got himself bitten and didn't tell anyone. I had talked to him before. He was a very intelligent man. I just think when someone gets infected, they talk themselves into denial. "Maybe I wasn't bitten bad enough." "There's no need to alarm anyone, it's just a scratch anyways." "Maybe I got this from building the other day." I'll bet anything that that's what happened to him.

It was the middle of the night when he reanimated. He woke up dead, so to speak. By the time anyone had gotten wise to what was happening in the dark, he had already infected a few of us and those few were coming back and biting others. It was bad. I remember waking to this tearing noise. And chewing. I knew right then. I was like, here it is. This is the inevitable end. This is punishment for lying to my mom. I had lied my way into surviving. This was only just.

But everyone was ready. We had all talked about something like this happening and the colonists just jumped into action; as if on reflex, really. Flashlights flipped on and people from other fortified homes were hopping up onto the bridge to help…Those zombies never had a chance. We just jumped on them. No one was afraid. Even those who had been right there watching their friend get eaten—they weren't afraid. We rose up.

That quietness I had felt that on that first day. This feeling seemed like the polar opposite of that. I felt a sense of togetherness. They had all been calling themselves "colonists", but I thought it was a joke. Everyone was laughing and getting along with eachother, but I thought they were just polishing brass on a sinking ship. But they wanted to survive because they were all friends now. Brothers and sisters. They had seen me as the one who pulled them all together. A young father-figure, I suppose. And I had never felt that connection until that night.

The reason I'm so amazed that that incident is one of our only problems was because that night sealed the deal. We were family. I still meet up with all of the colonists every year and we always talk about that night as the most important thing that happened to us.

**(The sun has disappeared behind the hills. He smiles at this.)**

Every night before the first of the survivors started arriving, I looked at every sunset as if it was my last. Falling into darkness with evil on every street. It plagued me always.

But now, it's gone. The sun will set, and I'll be able to see it when it rises; God willing. And the first time I felt any of this was the night after the incident.

The sun will rise tomorrow, I thought to myself. The sun will rise tomorrow.

And it did.

**(I turn and see the framed newspaper. It reads: "The Road to Salvation: The Miracle at Doyle Colony.")**

I still say its nonsense.


End file.
